Last Orders

Vince

Amy said, 'Will you go in and see him?' and I said, 'Yeh, I'll go and see him.' She wasn't crying and her voice was clear and steady. She wasn't insisting or demanding. It was like she was asking a polite, considerate question, like a host to a guest. I even reckon she was holding her head a bit higher and her back a bit straighter, as if this was an important day, a very important day, and she had to see it got managed proper, like something special had happened to her and she wanted to share it.

She'd just come out. She'd just been to see him herself.

I said, 'Yeh, I want to see him.' Like I couldn't have said no, even if I'd wanted to. You don't refuse to see someone's prize possession.

She said, 'You go through the door and ask the man,' and I thought, She don't know it's happened yet.

So I went through the door and asked the man. He had a rumpled white jacket and a pale podgy face to go with it, and he looked at me like I shouldn't expect him to understand what a big deal it was for me, any more than he should expect me to understand how it wasn't for him.

It said 'Chapel of Rest'. He said, 'Mr Dodds?' and I wondered which one he meant. I said, 'That's me,' when maybe I should've said, 'That's him.' He said, 'Through there.'

There was this little room with a glass partition down the length of it and an opening at one end you could step through, otherwise you could just look. On the other side of the glass there was Jack, raised up on something and lying on his back, and I thought, That aint Jack, he aim real. I suppose I was right.

You could only see his head because they'd wrapped him up in something like a pale-pink curtain or a tablecloth, right up to his chin. It was covering what he was lying on an' all. Like Jack was just his head, it wasn't a body, there wasn't no dead body.

I went through the opening and stood beside him. It smelt cold. I thought, He don't know I'm here, he can't ever know Fm here. Unless. I thought, He aint Jack Dodds, no more than I'm Vince Dodds. Because nobody aint nobody. Because nobody aint more than just a body, than just their own body, which aint nobody.

Except you can't see his body under that tablecloth.

Then I just stood there looking at him and I felt myself going straight and tall, like I wasn't just standing there, I was holding myself proud and stiff, like Amy. I was standing to attention. Like the only proper thing to do was to go stiff and straight and still and stony just like Jack was, out of sympathy. Except upright.

And I thought, I should see him naked. Because we all are, aren't we? He's naked underneath, under the tablecloth. I should see his body. I should see his hands and his feet and his knees and his bleeding bollocks an' all. I should see Jack Dodds' body. Because this is Jack, Jack Dodds, but he don't look like Jack, he looks like the bleeding Pope. Because naked we come and naked we. But they've kitted him out so he looks like the Pope.